New home buyers choose Windsor over county suburbs

Tarik Balbaki sits in the kitchen of his new home on Askin Avenue in South Windsor. Balbaki's neighbourhood was the second fastest growing area in the region from 2006 to 2011. (NICK BRANCACCIO/The Windsor Star)

When Tarik Balbaki’s family was deciding where to build a new home, they considered the county suburbs, but the convenience of Windsor just couldn’t be beat.

“It was a no-brainer for me. I like the city life, I like Windsor. I feel like Windsor’s growing,” said Balbaki, who lives in the South Cameron neighbourhood just northeast of Huron Church Road and E.C. Row Expressway. “For my family, personal preference was to be right there.”

Balbaki, a 38-year-old business owner with the Walker Road kitchen cabinet, furniture and mattress store Warehouse Guys, is one of the people drawn to Windsor’s fastest growing neighbourhoods for the attractions of both urban and suburban living. New subdivisions in South Windsor and East Riverside offer brand new homes with big yards and ample parking that are just a short drive away from schools, work, shopping and entertainment in Detroit and downtown Windsor.

The trend isn’t what you might expect, considering the City of Windsor’s population shrank over the last five years while the suburban bedroom communities of LaSalle, Kingsville and Lakeshore saw small gains. But a detailed analysis of census data shows four out of the five fastest growing neighbourhoods in the region were inside Windsor city limits.

Windsor’s expansion eastward has been in the works for decades, with the framework for new development under the East Riverside Planning Area included in the city’s official plan. The new houses attracted new residents, with the Forest Glade and Little River Corridor areas each growing by about 10 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

But the biggest gains were in South Windsor, with the Walker Gates neighbourhood near Walker Road and Highway 401 adding about 240 new dwellings and almost 20 per cent more people. Balbaki’s neighbourhood was the second-fastest growing, with 325 new dwellings drawing about 15 per cent more people.

The numbers show that even in the depths of the recession, people were still buying houses in Windsor – but turning up their noses at resale homes in the city centre. John Rauti, a sales representative with Valente Real Estate whose family business, J. Rauti Custom Homes Limited, built many of the houses that got snapped up in those fast-growing neighbourhoods, said a lot of factors lined up to make it popular to buy brand new homes on Windsor’s outskirts during that five-year period.

“They can go just outside the core and they get a bigger property, a better neighbourhood,” he said. “They’re researching schools and they just want the amenities that they have around these brand new areas.”

Overcrowding is already a problem in some schools in the city’s fastest growing neighbourhoods. Talbot Trail, an elementary school in the fastest growing neighbourhood in Windsor, recently readjusted its boundaries so it could accommodate full-day kindergarten and still has several portables on site.

Greater Essex County District School Board superintendent of education Terry Lyons said the board can only take current enrolment, not future projections, into account when it’s building or making additions to schools. That’s how brand new schools sometimes end up with parking lots full of portables almost immediately.

“We’re not allowed to build on prospect. We have to build on existing. And that’s where we don’t look very intelligent at times,” he said.

But the challenges that come when a neighbourhood grows faster than services and infrastructure haven’t stopped Windsorites from flocking to new subdivisions. With rock bottom property values, many people conclude they can get more bang for their buck by building a new house from the ground up than by gutting a fixer upper in an established neighbourhood.

Rauti said during the five-year period included in the census data, the fee the City of Windsor charges developers to hook up new neighbourhoods to infrastructure like water and sewers was significantly lower. That fact, combined with cheaper housing prices, added an incentive for people looking to build a new home to buy within city limits.

Rauti said that’s changing, however. The city gives developers who want to tear down an old house and build a new one in Windsor’s declining core neighbourhoods a discount, but in 2010, it raised the fee to hook new houses up to municipal services in new subdivisions by about $4,000.

The rising cost of building a new home in Windsor, combined with the city’s higher tax rates compared to the county, have slowed new home construction significantly in recent years, Rauti said. He predicted the next census would show an even more pronounced population push right out of Windsor and into the suburbs, with LaSalle experiencing the most growth.

“Development charges were cheaper in Windsor back then. Now, they’re out of reach,” he said. “People aren’t really even building in Windsor as much any more and I see it really slowing down in Windsor.”

Map of growing/shrinking neighbourhoods in the Windsor, Ont. area. Areas in red represent a negative population growth while areas in blue represent a positive population growth. (The Windsor Star-Web Grab)

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